GOP has a 'natural' House majority

As the midterm campaign enters its closing weeks, prognosticators expect large Republican gains, and most predict the GOP will take a majority in the House. Pundits and pollsters attribute likely Democratic losses to various causes: President Barack Obama’s declining popularity, tenacious unemployment, fears about the federal deficit, tea-party-generated energy among the opposition forces and a well-settled tendency for the party in the White House to lose congressional seats at midterm.

But maybe all these explanations are wrong. Perhaps the expected House Republican majority represents something like a return to “normal” for this period of American history.

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The political geography and racial politics of the United States have shifted so dramatically over the past generation that Republicans possess something like a natural majority in the House — one that dissolves only amid extreme conditions such as the Iraq stalemate in 2006 and the Bush administration economic crisis two years later. But it stubbornly reasserts itself when those destabilizing forces diminish.

Such a natural majority is hardly unusual. For nearly a half-century, from the 1930s to the 1980s, Democrats dominated Congress.

Democrats controlled a majority of the House for all but four years between the end of World War II and the Newt Gingrich-led takeover of 1994. Though the party frequently lost seats during midterm elections with a Democratic president, the party enjoyed a comfortable majority status.

With John F. Kennedy in the White House in 1962, for example, Democrats lost just four seats and retained an 83-seat majority. Four years later, with Lyndon B. Johnson’s approval rating sinking fast, Democrats lost a seemingly massive 48 seats — and still held a 60-seat cushion.

During that period, the nation’s demographic and political geography seemed to guarantee a Democratic House. The party retained influence in the once solidly Democratic South. But it owed its hold on the House to its strength in Northern industrial states like New York, Illinois and Michigan. Drawing heavily on blue-collar union and white urban-ethnic voters, Democrats for decades enjoyed a large, rapidly expanding base. Those three states, for example, accounted for a whopping 84 congressional seats in 1968.

During the 1970s and 1980s, however, the tides of U.S. politics turned. A booming economy and burgeoning population transformed the South and Southwest. Renamed the Sun Belt, this outcast region wrested control of national politics — sending the winning candidate to the White House in every presidential election from 1964 until 2008. (Gerald R. Ford, the only Rust Belt president between Kennedy and Barack Obama, was never elected.)